by Mary Robison
Back in the green convertible we drove an access road that paralleled the Gulf Freeway. We passed a furniture warehouse, industrial plants, a Flintkote factory that was sided with glazed tiles.
My motel room was at the Park Inn, a pricey building built during the boom.
The room had a low ceiling, and off the front balcony was a great palm that sent barbed shadows through the picture window and made pointy areas of darkness and chill.
Raymond docked his car next to my rental, the red Firecat.
“Don’t think we’re quitting yet,” he said, as he stopped his engine from screaming.
Now instead we had the happy ratcheting of a zillion cicadas.
“There’s still several of Raf’s people I can ask. Who might’ve caught his act someplace or other.”
In my room were pieces of blond rattan furniture. The quilted bedspread and cushions and carpeting were gray-green colors. Tropical-Confederate was the motif here, I supposed.
Raymond yanked off his heavy boots and kicked them that-away, dropped backward onto the bed, stacked both pillows behind his shoulders to prop himself up.
Over the dressing-room counter, I slit cellophane from a throw-away drinking tumbler but could draw only warm water.
Raymond steadied the gray desk phone on the lap of his jeans. He was all business, readying to make calls.
I went out for a bucket of ice.
On the room’s far back wall were glass doors that could be jerked open to a catwalk and for a view of the court below. The court had a patio, web-and-metal lounge chairs, an Olympic pool, all-out landscaping.
I went with my tumbler of ice water through the sliding glass doors.
It was evening now, and a hundred artificial lights glowed on the court below. Down there were Black Southern Baptist goings-on.
The Park Inn was hosting a couple of conventions this week—the Baptists, who posed in maillots and swim trunks of sherbet colors on the pool’s concrete patio, and a gathering of foreign scholars, bearded men and pale women in dresses.
In the water at the pool’s shallow end, the children of both groups spanked up fans of splash.
There were spotlights on the spears and spikes of junglery overhead. Shadows made jagged stabbing lines across the patio chairs and table umbrellas.
“Well, fuck it,” Raymond said after a call. “Now you see him, now you don’t. There’s still several people I can talk to, though.”
I said, “They’re getting up a water-polo game down in the pool. You want a drink? There’s a bottle of Hennessy in my things somewhere.”
“Just soda pop,” Raymond said. “I’m recovered, they call it.”
“How long?”
“Three years.” He clawed at his hair.
“Then what you especially didn’t need was a visit from my husband, Jack Daniels.”
“Hell, I like the guy,” Raymond said.
“I know,” I said and I did. “You gotta like Raf.”
Raymond brought a swimsuit from the trunk of the green convertible.
“Would you get tossed outa here if I was to put myself in that pool? I would dearly love to,” he said.
“No, of course you should. You deserve at least that for all your trouble.”
“I been enjoying myself, actually,” he said.
“Is Luisa your wife? I noticed her name painted on the car.”
Raymond made his smile. He said, “Two years now. Which was all of the original bargain. I married her on an arrangement, see. Her family’s rich. They wanted her in the States. We got a little daughter, Maria, now though. So I’m feeling pretty lucky.”
The roar from the Gulf Freeway was like thunderstorm wind and with it came blasts of cheetering night birds. These were tiny birds that zipped; flitting birds.
I had grabbed the last empty chaise. Raymond was in the water. Above, a breeze moved the mighty palms and they hissed like shaken pom-poms.
I fixed on a conversation the foreign scholars were having at a nearby table.
“Today, I’m happy. Things look a little better.”
“The weather?” someone asked.
“No, I mean in my country. The military removed the state of emergency, so who can tell? Perhaps they fear the October elections.”
A man with a Czech accent said, “It’s better for us as well, but we don’t forget what happened after Dubcek.”
The roar from the Gulf Freeway hadn’t quit—a hushing noise, like a river flowing over a low dam.
“I watched your new film, Bolo,” said an American with a comic’s quick delivery. “Are you crazy? I didn’t understand one thing.”
“Nothing you liked?”
Someone said: “Most ideas we have aren’t ours. We just think we thought of them.”
“Is that your idea or someone else’s?” asked the American.
“Wait, wait, wait,” the man named Bolo began.
“Uh oh,” the American said. “Echolalia.”
“So obvious,” the Czech said and I heard his bored sigh.
“Example?” someone asked.
Raymond was swimming a careful sidestroke the length of the pool.
“Jiri,” the Czech said, “that is not your firsthand knowledge.”
“Letters from my father, the papers, yes. Reliable origins, I’m sure,” a voice said.
Bolo said, “Various texts, but they congeal. If I were filming this, I’d include Amida’s frock, her little radio playing Vivaldi. . . .”
“Scarlatti,” the Czech said.
“We men, sitting a certain way, competing for her attentions . . .”
“Selection, no?” someone said. “What it means to be an artist.”
“That is again, Jiri, not your idea but a received one,” said the Czech.
I elbowed up and, dragging my chair behind me, moved away from the scholars. They were reminding me too much of Cambridge.
Raymond sharked the pool from edge to edge now, wriggling along the basin submerged. He did well in the water, although there seemed not enough of it for him.
He vaulted out, switched around so he was seated with his shins dangling over the cement ledge, his burnished back to me. “I’m ten years younger,” he said without turning.
He knew I was watching him, though.
Raymond pulled his Levi’s on over his soaked trunks and made three more calls.
“Jesu Christay,” he said, banging the receiver. “We just can’t get this old truck painted.”
“Raf,” I said.
“I mean, damn! He could be in Saskatchewan or in the next room,” Raymond said. He braced his back on the headboard, finally squinting at me in my poolside outfit: a tank top and jeans hacked off high on the thigh. “Are you real skinny? Or am I just used to different?”
“My weight could be down.”
“No, maybe that’s how you all’re supposed to look these days. Maybe Luisa should tighten it up a button or two.”
“I’m probably too thin . . . haven’t been eating much the last few weeks,” I said.
“Hunger strike? Or’d the cook run off with Raf?”
“Raf is the cook, in fact,” I said.
“Don’t get scratchy with me, darlin’. I know marriage is sacred, even if yours has gone screwy. But I’ll tell you true, I’m glad I’m not married to Raf. Was he embellishing or you really teach at Harvard?”
“I do but it’s nothing hard,” I said. “A lot of the time it’s like being a camp counselor.”
“Raf was bragging on you,” Raymond said.
He lit a cigarette, still studying me. His hair was towel dried, tousled. “So, what’s your uh—what do you teach?”
“Poetry. Writing it. Reading it some.”
“Brr,” Raymond said.
“Poetry forms especially,” I said. “Fixed forms are my area and what I try to write.”
“Publish any of it?”
“Four books.” I nod
ded. “And I’m halfway through another. Well, maybe not halfway. Haven’t got much done since Raf left, though I’m supposed to be writing full-time. I have a year’s leave from teaching. June to next June. I got an arts grant bigger than my Harvard salary.”
Raymond said, “The more I see you, the more I think it’s a good skinny you are.”
“What do we do now? I mean, about Raf,” I asked.
“Oh, there’s still some brick walls we can beat our heads against,” said Raymond.
Before he left, he said, “ ‘How is the gold become dim,’ Lamentations: four, one.”
He said tomorrow I should try an address near Viet Nam Plaza, close to the downtown. “No, wait on that until I can take you,” he said. “Or pack a rod, I most strongly advise.”
And on, “ ‘I am the man that hath known affliction. . . . It was I whom he led . . . where no light is,’ Lamentations: three, verse—don’t remember.” He left.
The Firecat had cream-colored seats, a radio-cassette and c.d. deck, smoked windows, burglar alarms, willful air conditioning.
But I was late getting started, having put off awakening till noon and then spent an hour with the street map just trying to figure a route to Viet Nam Plaza.
As I drove along the South Loop now in dusk’s glow, the banking sun and rising moon were comically big, vermilion.
I exited where my map was marked with Lumolighter; piloted down a ramp, passed the Phan Dai Butcher Shop, and entered a hopeless ghetto.
The downtown buildings—banks and towers from before the crash—with their height and cool angles and slick panes, loomed close but unreal as Oz beside these junkyard streets.
Like a little bit of Saigon, this village was—Hau Dac Ti Place: bombed-out restaurants, shelled shops. The houses were lean-tos, and there wasn’t one lawn.
My fingernail creased the street map balanced on my thigh. I needed to find Astro Ave.
The address Raymond had given me was for a converted filling station: a windowless building with CATFISH DEN painted along its forehead. Another sign read, BILLIARDS, WINE SET UPS, AIR COOLED! Razzle-dazzle lights spangled on a third sign out in the gravel parking lot. Most of the letters were bashed out on that sign. I couldn’t guess what it said—L T QU STL Y HA.
The temperature was a hundred and seven. The air smelled of crude oil. It felt wet but there would be no rain, not here or anywhere else according to the headline of the Chronicle.
Actually, the address was for the place upstairs, which was a natural-wood box on stilts. The area beneath the box was filled with candy-colored car seats, parts of cars, two refrigerators, a Danish Modern couch.
The only way up was an unrailed flight of steps. But up there, life! In three windows buzzed noisy fans.
The woman who answered my knock said, “You’re from Raymond?”
“I’m Paige. Mrs. Deveaux.”
“Right, then I’m Jewels,” the woman said. She was light-skinned, green-eyed, blonde, with the face shape and features of a Scandinavian. She wore a flowered kimono.
Her place smelled like a dinner party—as if she’d made canapés—and of the hot shortening and flour for pastry foods.
A television vibrated with a man singing “La Tremenda.”
The window fans made everything that was loose swing or flutter.
“Grab a beer,” Jewels said. Her accent was all Texas and her voice had rust in its depths.
“We gotta yell over the fans but I never did believe in air conditioning. You know? I think sweating’s good for your pores—sweat awl the time and stay youthful. You wanna have dinner with me, sweets?”
“No thanks,” I said, but accepted the lo-cal beer she passed to me.
I watched her fill a brown-freckled tortilla with beans and rice and green chili picante.
“Raymond didn’t really explain why I was supposed to come here,” I said. “I’m hunting for my husband. Maybe you know that already.”
“How do you smoke and keep your skin so smooth?” she asked.
Over her head hung a door-sized Fuelex poster that showed a growling wolf, “HI OCTANE 93,” the poster said.
She said, “You belong to Raf, I know.”
Now she lay back on a couch the color of papaya.
On an end table, rows of giant novena candles squatted in glass containers big as thermos jugs. One black holder had a cobra on its side. Another was printed with “Iglesia Bisettra!” and the letters dripped blood. Others were painted with little portraits or figures of saints.
Jewels’s bathroom door wore a wood cemetery cross that was wired around with fabric flowers, white and hot pink.
She swirled beer in her cheeks as if using mouthwash. She swallowed and said, “Raymond has gotten so damned keerful. I miss the old Raymond, isn’t that terrible? When he drank? But I do. I almost wish he’d have a slip. These are strange times.”
“What’s Raymond being careful about?” I asked. “Do you know where my husband is?”
“I sorta do. He’s with Julio. Julio’s mine. He’s a wonderful man.”
“But do you know where Julio is either?”
“I sorta do,” Jewels said. “He’s with my sister. Raf and him’re both with my sister Reba. Me and Reba are hairdressers for Nicole Roccio? You know Nicole’s. They’re all over town.”
“I just got here,” I said.
“We do that and help out our daddy some. Our daddy owns that bar downstairs you probably seen.”
She said, “You look like you’re gonna scream, Mrs. Deveaux.”
“Paige,” I said. “I need to find Raf. And this reminds me of those nightmares when you’re moving in slow motion. Please go on. You were saying about Reba? Your husband, Julio?”
Jewels smiled and waved off the smoke from my cigarette, which was unnecessary. Her fans were pushing such a current her blond hair blew on end.
She said, “All right, it’s like this. When Raymond threw Raf out, Raf called up Reba . . .”
“Of course, naturally.”
“Well,” Jewels said. “Raf doesn’t have a lot of money.”
“But he sure has friends.”
“Hey, sweets, don’t climb on me. I’m not in this. I got a set situation with Julio. You mind if I ask about something, though? I can’t quite feature you with Raf.”
I bit on that, gave Jewels an assenting nod. Finally I said, “We’re a lot alike, have a lot in common. . . .”
“Yeah, I can see that. You’re much too straight for the Raf I know.”
“I meant underneath,” I said. I really didn’t want to try for words on what was between Raf and me.
“Sex?” Jewels said.
“That and everything. We need each other. Otherwise we can’t feed or dress ourselves. We don’t know what to think next.”
“Oh,” Jewels said, gesturing acceptance with her raised eyebrows.
Outside a tomcat squealed.
“So Raf came over and he collected Julio, and then as soon as Reba got off work, they all three went to The Anzac Club and the New Texas Motel.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Don’t it give you the sicks, that place? They were there awhile though, and then at Reba’s, and today they’re either coming here or going to Facinita or over the border.”
“I hope you didn’t mean that last.”
“Wish I didn’t,” Jewels said.
With her kimono she wore slacks and padded white shoes, like nurses’ shoes.
“Did you just get off work? When did you last talk to any of them?” I asked.
“Few hours ago. . . . I gotta take a bath,” she said. “You’re more’n welcome to wait here. They might come, who knows? Or you could try Facinita. It’s a dance place for Hispanics? But you know what? I think you could pass. You’re brown as toast. You’d get hit on but they got security, no big deal. You should wear a bra if you go.”
“What if they decide on Mexico?”
Jewels shrugged and moved through the door with the flowered cemetery cross.
I heard a torrent of bathwater.
She came back and undressed while she chattered at me. I thought this could be an act of competition, that she felt close to Raf and wanted to show me what I was up against. Or maybe she was like a kid, treating me as a sister, never imagining a same-sex erotic context. Or she was ready for anybody, anytime.
“Raymond quote the Bible to you? That shit drives me lupo. He never used to, I’ll tell you that,” she was saying.
Anyway, she didn’t make a bad show. The room was hot and she had the sheen of perspiration she wanted. Tattooed around her ankle was a fine-link chain in indigo ink. I couldn’t guess her age—eighteen or thirty-five—either way.
I finished my beer and it felt like nothing.
“Raymond used to be the best non-Latino man I ever knew,” Jewels said. “That’s when he was drinking. Now between Luisa, and the church, and AA . . . They’ve made him a robot. What’s the point of him even living?”
She vanished again, and suddenly I didn’t mind being here. I cracked a second beer.
Jewels had lit a few of the novena candles, and the winds from the wagging fans played with the candle flames, sending them sideways every five seconds.
I unbagged a pen and my poetry notebook. Just words, I listed at first, but then I got a start on a tercet. This tercet, if a student had submitted it to me, would’ve earned a low C.
I reeled over and whomped cheerily on the bathroom door. “Jewels! How’s the water?”
She said, “I’m glad you waited. I can go to Facinita with you. I won’t need no ride home and you’ll feel better if you’re with someone.”
I wanted to go alone, though. I wanted to get drunker, go alone, and the hell with a bra.
“What’ll we do, leave a note for Raf and them?”
“Good thinking,” Jewels called. “In case they decide to crash-land.”
“Do you have any more of that beer?” I asked her.
“Sí,” she said. “In the kitchen in the fridge compartment. Then how ’bout soaping my back for me?”
“Not this month, Jewels. Sorry.”
“Texans are very friendly. You oughta get more friendly, Paige.”
